Also sprach Jürgen Exner:
> Tassilo v. Parseval wrote:
>> Also sprach Jürgen Exner:
>>
>>> Guest1 wrote:
>>> [see subject]
>>>
>>> Hashes are mappings and by definition don't have an order, therefore
>>> there is no first element or first value.
>>> Or how would you select the first value of let's say the cubicroot
>>> function?
>>
>> Well, the first one is probably 0 (at least for real numbers). The
>> challenge is to find the second value since it has a non-discrete
>> carrier.
>
> You fell for the trap 
> For squareroot(x) you are probably right.
> But I was talking about cubicroot and I would think that -5 comes before 0.
Oups, right.

I somehow failed to see that the cubicroot is x^(1/3) and
not x^(1/2).
> You could also argue that in case of squareroot i comes before 0. But there
> are too many people who don't know complex numbers, therefore it makes a
> poor example.
Well, i would be part of the result anyway (when taking the squareroot
of a negative number). If you define the range of your result to be
within the real numbers, the smallest input that is allowed is 0.
But indeed, finding the first number is even harder for complex numbers
since you suddenly have two dimensions to consider.
Tassilo
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